#unit lore

> Grade 3 "Chakrabarthi Divine Dragon, Nirvana" / Kondou Yuuyu

A dragon born from a dragon's egg. Born from the Sunrise Egg that suddenly appeared in the Red Temple of Dawn, it is an existence whose birth has been long-awaited. As one can tell from the name "Chakrabarthi Divine Dragon", the same as the name of this era, it is a dragon who hides the potential to become a great divinity of sunlight.

Nation: Dragon Empire Race: Flame Dragon

> Grade 2 "Blaze Maiden, Reiyu" / Kondou Yuuyu

A maiden of the Red Temple of Dawn in the Dragon Empire. 20 years old. Together with Rino, Zonne, and Rona, she performs ceremonies for the dragon's egg through song and dance. With a calm personality, she is like the older sister of the group of four.

Nation: Dragon Empire Race: Human

> Grade 1 "Blaze Maiden, Rino" / Kondou Yuuyu

A maiden of the Red Temple of Dawn in the Dragon Empire. 18 years old. Together with Reiyu, Zonne, and Rona, she performs ceremonies for the dragon's egg through song and dance. With a carefree personality, she tends to go off on tangents when talking to the other maidens.

Nation: Dragon Empire Race: Human

> Grade 0 "Sunrise Egg" / Kondou Yuuyu

A dragon's egg, enshrined in the Red Temple of Dawn. Since ancient times, it has been enshrined and worshipped in this temple, without even the slightest movement; however, when the Chakrabarthi Era began, it started to show signs of hatching. According to legend, when this egg responds to the prayers of the maidens, "the future will hatch".

Nation: Dragon Empire Race: Flame Dragon

> Grade 3 “Diabolos ‘Violence’ Bruce” / Momoyama Danji

The leader of Team “Diabolos”. A seasoned veteran demon overflowing with fighting spirit. His name is known throughout planet Cray as someone who can’t resist not only a game of gallowsball, but a good fight as well. He keeps his juniors (his teammates) together with overwhelming pride and bravery.

Nation: Dark States Race: Demon

> Grade 2 “Diabolos ‘Anger’ Richard” / Momoyama Danji

A demon who wears glasses (sports goggles). A rare intelligent type in Team “Diabolos”. About 20 in human years. His playstyle is smart, reminiscent of “intelli-yakuza”, but in reality, he’s scared of getting hurt.

Nation: Dark States Race: Demon

> Grade 1 “Diabolos ‘Bad’ Steve” / Momoyama Danji

The raid captain of Team “Diabolos”. A demon. About 18 in human years. Has a violence-loving personality and values destructive power. Though he’s lively, he also has an unexpected cooperative spirit, and so is a valuable asset to a team full of strong-willed people who like to have their own way.

Nation: Dark States Race: Demon

> Grade 0 “Diabolos ‘Innocent’ Matt” / Momoyama Danji

A member of Team “Diabolos”. A young demon boy. About 16 in human years. The youngest of his brothers, he innocently sees gallowsball as just a sport, and simply enjoys playing with his seniors.

Nation: Dark States Race: Demon

> Grade 3 “Apex Ruler, Bastion” / Ebata Touya

The captain of the sky knights, the Cloud Knights, and the wielder of a holy sword. His entire body is covered in sparkling armor; even the sky horse he rides is fully armored. He seems to be human, but his age is unknown. He is the embodiment of the perfect Cloud Knight, an upholder of the law; his judgement is fair but severe, and his orders are absolute. He draws respect and awe from both knights and civilians.

Nation: Keter Sanctuary Race: Human

> Grade 2 “Knight of Heavenly Spear, Rooks” / Ebata Touya

A member of the Cloud Knights. A young Elvish man. About 20 in human years. Known for being quite the fashionable dandy. His trademarks are his sharp tongue, his cynical worldview (especially regarding women), and his transparent visor. Of course, as a military man, his skill with a spear is good enough to be chosen for the Cloud Knights.

Nation: Keter Sanctuary Race: Elf

> Grade 1 “Knight of Heavenly Sword, Fort” / Ebata Touya

A member of the Cloud Knights. A young human man. 18 years old. Though young, he’s an excellent wielder of a two-handed sword. As befits a Cloud Knight, he is loyal to his duty, and serious to the point that he’s sometimes brushed off as too straight-laced. He honors fairness and justice, and hates evil. As he’s also handsome, he attracts a little attention within his division.

Nation: Keter Sanctuary Race: Human

> Grade 0 “Knight of Heavenly Bow, Beis” / Ebata Touya

A squire of the Cloud Knights. A young angel boy. About 14 in human years. Though chosen by the Cloud Knights for his skill with a bow, he is carefree, and still has many weak spots. His duty is to act as an escort and guard for the dragon’s egg enshrined in the Red Temple of Dawn.

Selsera: “Knowledge is a treasure, and words are a sword.” We travel across this planet Cray, and gather shards of lost memory.

Selsera: (Huff. . . that’s it.)

Arius: -It’s no time to be acting cool and putting on airs, Lady Selsera! We’ve gotten lost, again!

Selsera: Do you still not understand after traveling together for so long, Arius? Taking the shortest and fastest route to our destination is not a true journey- only movement.

Arius: Ah, is that so. . . Even so, Master, you have a pretty bad sense of direction, don’t you? Well, you’re a magician, so I guess your scouting ability is. . . (mumbling)

Selsera: Silence, greenhorn. Aren’t your science items just pieces of junk when the battery runs out?

Arius: Master, you promised not to mention that. . .

Selsera: I possess the power of magic, the sage’s staff MacGuffin, and Muu-chan. You are a mere apprentice, on probation, a super-super underling- remember that well.

Arius: I’m even lower than the staff?! And Moonback* is that fluffy thing around your neck, right?!

(* Translator’s note: “Muu-chan” seems to be short for “Moonback”.)

Selsera: I won’t forgive you if you make fun of Muu-chan. When Moonback manifests its true form, it matches the strength of a thousand men- it’s the most powerful of beasts. It would swallow the likes of you in one bite.

Arius: Would you please stop setting your beast on your apprentice?

Selsera: Hmph, it’s because you say impudent things. Come, apologize and you will be forgiven.

Arius: . . . I apologize. If you are willing, Lady Selsera, I would like to humbly partake in your teachings once again.

Selsera: Mm, is that it? What happened to the usual? The usual thing?

Arius: Ehh, that again?

Selsera: Raising his master’s spirits is, too, one of the apprentice’s most important tasks.

Arius: . . .

Arius: O greatest treasure of the nation of the Dark States, that one who brings to light the memories of this planet from ancient times to now, the singular, peerless, first and last of your kind, unparalleled in history, our great sage, “Seeker of Knowledge, Lady Selsera”. I beg of you, please bestow the blessings of your wisdom upon me.

Selsera: Very well. You may continue to follow me, O unworthy apprentice. (Ooh, that has a nice ring. . .)

Three thousand years ago, in the lush nation of Zoo on Planet Cray, lived a young bioroid boy named Rorowa. Bioroids are humanlike, but with the longevity and grace of plants, and bioroids are capable of manipulating plantlife. Slender and unassuming, Rorowa has dark green hair that is decorated with the beautiful leaves and berries of the rowan tree.

Rorowa isn’t good at much; his skills with a sword are mediocre, and he lacks self-confidence. As a result, he tends to get swept up in the actions of the people around him. One such person is the bioroid Olivi, who travels across Cray with Rorowa at his side.

Olivi — a large bioroid who looked to be in his mid-twenties in human terms — was the one who found Rorowa, seventeen years ago. Unlike most creatures, like humans or dragons, bioroids have no parents and are born fully-formed from the plant life of Cray. Olivi rudely woke the bioroid boy, who was sleeping peacefully in a cradle of thin leaves, by kicking him.

“Sleep time is over! Good morning! Good morning, good morning, good morning!”

The forest around him was withered and dying, the trees naked, and a foul stench of death and decay filled the air. If it had not been for Olivi waking him up, the young bioroid would likely have perished alongside it all.

Because he found the bioroid boy amidst the death of the forest, the only survivor of an unknown catastrophe that wreaked havoc upon the land, Olivi named him after the rowan: a resilient and hardy tree, one that can grow in harsh conditions and survive even being burned seven times.

And just like that, the bioroid youth Rorowa’s tumultuous life began.

—

In the town of Turi, a rural area in the west of the nation Zoo, Olivi overhears some villagers discussing the Burner Ant, a large, fiery insect belonging to a criminal gang within Megacolony. They fear that it is only a matter of time before their wheat fields burn to the ground because of it. Of course, Olivi is unable to stand idly by, and Rorowa finds himself being chased through the wheat fields by the Burner Ant not long after.

Neither he nor Olivi is suited for combat, and they find themselves trapped between a wide, deep irrigation canal and the angry Burner Ant. Olivi mutters something about a “special trick,” which Rorowa is deeply apprehensive about, before picking up Rorowa around the waist and hoisting him up. For a moment, Rorowa thinks that Olivi is going to throw him across the canal, to safety, but, to Rorowa’s dismay, Olivi hurls Rorowa like a spear… at Burner Ant.

Rorowa smashes into Burner Ant with his head, knocking the monster unconscious and probably giving Rorowa a concussion. This is the beginning of their problems.

Part of Burner Ant, still on fire, touches Rorowa’s foot unexpectedly. In his panic, Rorowa kicks it off of him—

—and ignites the entire field of dry wheat.

—

It takes several hours to extinguish the fire, and by then, the crop is totally destroyed. Rorowa apologizes profusely to a kindly turnip dryad, Heave-Ho Turnip, while Olivi unsuccessfully tries to make small talk. Because Rorowa and Olivi have very little money between the two of them, there is no way for them to pay the dryad back for the lost wheat. Olivi suggests selling his pendant, a black stone resembling an olive with fine gold grains embedded in it, but Heave-Ho Turnip dismisses it as a dirty necklace.

In exchange for allowing the two to stay at his inn, Heave-Ho Turnip points out deep ruts along the road and fields. There is apparently someone destroying the roads and crops, and Heave-Ho Turnip wants the two bioroids to find and punish them.

—

As a bioroid, Rorowa feels an almost physical pain at the thought of the wheat field burning down. Unable to sleep, he leaves Heave-Ho Turnip’s inn late at night, wandering out into the dark. The two moons in the sky of Cray are new moons, and there is very little natural light as a result. The fields are black ash, and he kneels down in the middle of it, summoning his innate power as a bioroid to bless the earth and bring life back to the fields. As he pours his power into the ground, small buds sprout up across the field, filling Rorowa with hope.

But this hope is short-lived.

As the grain is almost set, it turns black, as if rotting from the roots, then white-gray, and finally, it withers. Rorowa can remember the day of his “birth”; the ashen plantlife and ashy fields he sees now are just like they were when he woke into this world.

And then he hears the source of the destruction behind him.

A horrible creature emitting a sound so terrifying it is as if you’re being dragged by the feet into a deep abyss, dragging itself slowly across the ground. Rorowa can make out a series of blood-red eyes blinking through the darkness. From the dragging sound, he knows it must be a long creature. And as it opens its red-black calyx*, it laughs.

The creature is so terrifying that Rorowa cannot move. He knows he could never compete with it, he could never outrun it. And through his horror, he hears a familiar voice.

Hey Rorowa, I told you not to go out at night without me.

And Rorowa’s memory ends there.

—

What pulls Rorowa from his slumber is the sound of someone digging in the soil. Rorowa dimly realizes that he is in the dirt, judging by the smell of the ground surrounding him. Finally, the dirt in his face is shoveled away, and a light shines in his face.

Once he adjusts his gaze, he sees a girl holding a lantern and a shovel. She seems to be human, about Rorowa’s age (seventeen or eighteen), with long brown hair tied high and a determined gaze in her eyes.

Without thinking about what it must look like to find a body buried underground that is suddenly able to move, Rorowa reaches his arm up toward her. Of course, she mistook him for a zombie, and with a barely muffled scream, swings her shovel down at Rorowa, and takes off his left arm before he can protest.

It doesn’t hurt; in fact, the arm is shriveled at the shoulder anyway, and with the plant powers he possesses as a bioroid, he will be able to regenerate it. But it takes him—and the girl—a few minutes to regain their composure. The first thing Rorowa asks her as he is safely dug up is whether she makes a hobby of graverobbing. She answers evasively and wonders why there was even a person in the ground there, anyway.

Now that he is out of the ground, Rorowa can see that he is at the base of a massive tree, with roots lifted out of the ground and spread out across the ground. The trunk is thick, so it must be an ancient tree. His head hurts as he tries to remember what happened before losing consciousness. All he can remember is eating dinner and going to sleep… and he doesn’t know where Olivi is.

As he is thinking, a small dragon appears from behind the girl. He is the same color as the flame-colored outfit the girl wears, and he has two horns on his head, with a flame burning on his tail. The girl looks at Rorowa while nuzzling the dragon’s little face and introduces herself as Radylina, a Dragritter from the Dragon Empire, and the young dragon is Momokke, a Kagero dragon. Rorowa knows that the Dragritters are knights of the Dragon Empire who ride their dragon partners through the sky, much like the legendary Dragon Knight, Nehalem. But this dragon is so small and cute, a thought that Rorowa voices out loud. At Radylina’s indignant expression, Rorowa changes the conversation and introduces himself.

“Ah, I’m Rorowa.”

“Why were you buried there?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out…”

“Maybe you’re a very active sleepwalker, and just walked into the Sanctuary and buried yourself in the ground.”

“Sanctuary?”

The tree, she points out, is the World Tree, and the Sanctuary is part of the city that has sprung up around it. Protected by shrine maidens, the World Tree causes forests to flourish and gives great life to the region. Rorowa had seen it before, from a distance, in his travels with Olivi, but he doesn’t quite know how he traveled this far while unconscious.

He asks her which part of Zoo they were in — east or west? She frowns at him.

“Zoo? This is Stoichea. Zoo disappeared three thousand years ago.”

Three thousand is such an enormous number to Rorowa that it feels like a bizarre joke. There’s no way an entire nation the size of Zoo could just disappear. But before he can question her further, they hear voices coming from a nearby building.

“Who’s there?”

Several bioroids carrying lanterns in their hands approach them. Because this is a sanctuary, they are probably the security. With a click of her tongue, Radylina grabs something off the ground and hurls it at one of the guards. Her aim is accurate, and her arms are strong, so when one of the guards is struck, they fall unconscious. But Rorowa can’t really find it in him to be terribly impressed, because the thing she threw was—

“My arm!”

—Rorowa’s severed arm.

Radylina ditches her shovel and lantern and takes off. Rorowa follows her; when she asks why, annoyed, he has no idea, other than that they’re being chased and that it seems like he’s safer with an angry girl like her around. The voices of the guards chasing them echo in the air. Rorowa thinks he could probably start crying at any moment.

So begins Rorowa’s adventure in the world, three thousand years later.